Viktoria Tkaczyk's books shed new light on a wide range of materials and ideas and testify to a breadth of thought. The Professor of Knowledge and Media at Humboldt-Universit?t is currently writing a publication on the material wax. She is focussing on what at first glance appears to be an inconspicuous object of research: she is investigating the role that wax played as a preservative in natural history and humanities collections in the late 19th century and the political significance of the extraction and processing of the raw material.
Mining threatens culture and preserves it at the same time
With the advent of phonography at the end of the 19th century, wax plates and rollers were used to record, analyse and permanently preserve speech, music and acoustics in general - for example in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv founded at the beginning of the 20th century or in the sound archive of the Berlin State Library, which today belongs to the HU. Among other things, recordings of Sorbs and Wends can be found there, some of whose settlement areas had to make way for mining at the time. "The mining wax, which is extracted from lignite, was also used to make the rollers on which the Sorbian and Wendish dialects, which were threatened with extinction, were recorded," explains the researcher. The very mining industry that contributed to the disappearance of a language and culture also provided the material for its storage.
Honour
Tkaczyk is the 2026 Caroline von Humboldt-Preis winner, a professorship awarded annually by Humboldt-Universit?t to an outstanding researcher, which it funds with 80,000 euros. The humanities scholar teaches and researches at the interface between the history of science and media studies. She analyses technologies and knowledge techniques of the early modern and modern periods. Her publications deal with media in scientific experiments and test procedures, with the media of the natural sciences and humanities and, in general, with historical processes of gaining knowledge in and through media. Her website features books, essays and book chapters on a wide range of topics in her field of expertise. "I find it difficult to finish a book without knowing what comes next," she says. That's why she usually works on several publications at the same time.
Sound as a newly discovered field of research
One of her most recent publications is "Thinking with Sound. A New Programme in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900'. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023, the book has also attracted a great deal of international attention. The starting point of the study is the discovery of the auditory cortex in neuroanatomy in the late 19th century, which influenced numerous academic disciplines in the natural sciences and humanities. The publication is "a fascinating, well-written intellectual history of the many ways in which different European thinkers of the early 20th century engaged with sound as a field of study", according to one of many favourable reviews.
A versatile researcher with numerous publications
Tkaczyk is responsible for several third-party funded projects. In addition to the aforementioned project "Raw Materials of the Humanities - Material Provenances of Working Media", which she acquired from the German Research Foundation (DFG), Tkaczyk also heads the DFG-funded collaborative research group "Applied Humanities: Genealogy and Politics" together with HU professor Anke te Heesen. The interdisciplinary and international "small large-scale project" is concerned with a fundamental examination of the concept of application in the humanities, from which a new definition is to emerge. Tkaczyk is also part of the Teaching Faculty of the International Max Planck Research School "Knowledge and Its Resources". She has long been associated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science through her previous activities as holder of a Dilthey Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation and as head of the Max Planck Research Group "Episteme of Modern Acoustics".
Modern flight experiments in the focus of the dissertation
Viktoria Tkaczyk has been teaching and researching as a professor at Humboldt-Universit?t since 2015, initially as an endowed professor of the Max Planck Society and since 2018 as a full professor. After studying theatre studies, modern German literature and sociology in Munich, Madrid and Berlin, her career initially took her to the Free University for her doctorate. Her dissertation was dedicated to an unusual topic: "Himmels-Falten. On the theatricality of flight in the early modern period" describes a phase of aviation history in which there was no functioning flight technology. Starting with Leonardo da Vinci's flight sketches around 1500 and ending with the first successful balloon flight by the Montgolfière brothers (1783), Tkaczyk describes how modern flight experiments played an equally prominent role in scientific laboratories, on theatre stages, in travelogues, in utopian literature and in metaphysics. The study attracted widespread attention and was honoured with the Ernst Reuter Prize and the Book Award of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. It was at this point at the latest that her initial career aspirations of becoming a journalist gave way to a growing passion for academic work.
Between her dissertation and professorship, Tkaczyk conducted research as a postdoc at the Laboratoire SPHERE in Paris and was an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. "I commuted between several locations back then, which was enriching and exhausting," recalls the mother of two. "Over the years, I've benefited from a good international network and have been supported and inspired by colleagues and mentors." She was recently a visiting professor at Princeton University and a fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies. And now she is delighted that two HU colleagues have nominated her for the Caroline von Humboldt Professorship. And that she has been accepted.
Author: Ljiljana Nikolic